IP/optical integration typically results in cost savings, but maintaining service availability is also essential when measuring total return on investment (ROI). An analysis of 3 modes of operation found multi-layer protection and restoration to be the most cost efficient while meeting availability requirements.

Public safety professionals require the highest level of reliable, multimedia mobile communications to enhance their operational effectiveness. And while standard based long term evolution (LTE) provides the most cost-effective and secure way to support these broadband communications, transitioning to this new technology will demand a complex technical, operational, and business evolution for the public safety community.

Why LTE – and why now?

Public safety communications are at a turning point. The most urgent events – planned and unplanned – require more than mission-critical voice to improve first responders’ efficiency. Real-time imagery, video, geo-localization, and high-speed access to private cloud-based information and applications are becoming essential to fulfill first responders’ missions.

Existing private mobile radio (PMR) systems have limited capabilities to deliver this, because they were designed to primarily support narrowband mission-critical voice.

For LTE, it’s a different story. LTE can complement existing PMR networks to dramatically enhance operational effectiveness and coordination within a secure infrastructure shared by cooperating agencies.

OpenStack isn’t an as-is solution for telco network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructures. OpenStack is an open-source cloud management technology that provides many of the capabilities needed in any NFV environment. And this has prompted interest among many telco service providers.

But to realize the full benefits of NFV, service providers need NFV platforms that provide additional capabilities to support distributed clouds, enhanced network control, lifecycle management, and high performance data planes.

When companies merge the impetus is to immediately cut costs to achieve the hoped-of financial benefits. And all too often that means consolidation and cutbacks in the back offices i.e. contact centers.
So when United Airlines and Continental Airlines announced their merger earlier this week my radar went on to see if that is going to happen in this instance. The suspicion is yes, to some extent, but not as great as it would be if both firms were head-on competitors in major markets.

Outsourcing firms, especially those in the contact center space have to be that one-half-step ahead of their clientele, which tends to be fairly conservative, but which expects their suppliers to be on top of trends. This is a tail-perched-on-the-picket-fence situation because outsourcing is a notoriously highly-competitive thin-margin business and outsourcers have little spare cash, which means technology investments must have strong and immediate ROIs, yet companies find the money for them to have the tools to meet clients' needs.
And that sharp point is about to become even more uncomfortable with the rise of social media.

"The survey confirms something we've known for years: the contact center industry is one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing sectors in the U.S. economy," said James K. Noble, President and CEO of Noble Systems. "The overwhelmingly positive response reflects the strong diversity and innovation in the field today. Contact centers are an integral part of customer relationship management in an increasingly global and virtual marketplace."
This is great news. Yet is it time to finally fire up the bulldozers on that new center?
The hard reality is that the U.S. is still in the economic doldrums, with high unemployment and underemployment and long-term indebtedness that has squished consumers' pocketbooks. Bottom line: less spending resulting in fewer calls to contact centers for orders and service.

If one thinks that the rise of e-mail and the ease of spam has drawn all the mutts, skels and bottom-feeding marketers and clients from telemarketing, think again.
The trick du jour is spoofing phone numbers to make CallerID-savvy consumers and businesses think the callers are not telemarketers or are from other and reputable companies so that they will pick up the lines.

One of the key issues that are emerging with the rise of social media as a customer interaction tool is who should track, analyze and respond to what is being said on these sites.
A strong argument can be made is that it should be corporate communications/public relations either in-house or outside agencies rather than contact centers.

If a firm hires the right people both employees and supervisors, set expectations, track performance, get ahold of staff when they are not meeting the standards to point them in the right direction and follow then what difference does it make where they are? A word or two has just as much meaning if written in a text or uttered in a call as it does when the accompanying breaths can be felt on your neck. And they can be delivered at much less cost compared with housing everyone in the same room.

You now have had a chance to see us as who we are, sometimes a little cocky as if expecting to get humbled, and we did, whether thinking we could actually stage with global warming and predictions of a warm winter events at Cypress...or more tragically creating the arguably dangerous sled track at Whistler on which a young Georgian athlete died; we were at that track a few days later for the women's luge finals (there was an impromptu memorial set up for him under the Olympic rings in Whistler Village)...or when we faced the Americans in the men's hockey preliminaries.
Yet you also saw how we faced that adversity with perseverance and sometimes a little bit of luck. We just dug in our heels and worked at it.

I've been covering and working in this industry for over 14 years yet I've always thought the notion of contact centers, especially inbound first level ones kind of strange, as if they were a transitional means until the technologies and practices caught up with consumer and business demands for sales and service.
This is beginning to happen, which will doom traditional contact centers. If I were in the business of making contact center decisions I'd not approve any money to expand existing sites, or buy outsourcing services located in on-premises locations. Instead I would put the money into automated voice and web solutions, home agents and presence.

Companies like Tim Horton's, where employees interact with customers face-to-face make it clear to the clientele that these enterprises have the right to refuse service and as the Canadian coffee giant demonstrated will make this stick. Perhaps contact centers need a similar approach and language printed on bills and posted on web sites. Give the scum 'three strikes and you're out'. Perhaps institute a trigger of two objectionable calls for supervisors to make outbound inquiries to the dear persons to see "what's their problem?"

The Hope for Haiti telethon was a success. The Los Angeles Times reported that more than 83 million people tuned in Friday night with an average audience of more than 24 million viewers, leading to at least $61 million in to help survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake.